


Home in your Hands: That Day

by DarthSuki



Series: To Love a Titan [3]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: F/M, Freedom, In which the Attack Titan saves your life and becomes your guardian, M/M, Macro/Micro, Origin Story, Protectiveness, Size Difference, Survival, Titan Eren Yeager, Titan Shifters, Titans, near-drowning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-24
Updated: 2021-01-24
Packaged: 2021-03-16 10:28:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28954998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarthSuki/pseuds/DarthSuki
Summary: The fall of Wall Maria came as a surprise to everyone who had lived safely within it for over one hundred years. But for someone who lived in one of the districts along that very wall, the news was something of a death sentence. Survival becomes the only thing your mind until, one fateful day, you are saved by a strange titan who has a name and an unwavering fire in his eyes: Eren Yaeger.
Relationships: Attack Titan (Shingeki no Kyojin)/Reader, Eren Yeager/Reader
Series: To Love a Titan [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2123775
Comments: 4
Kudos: 126
Collections: EREN JAEGER|AOT





	Home in your Hands: That Day

**Author's Note:**

> This story is set within a canon-divergent series called 'Home in Your Hands'. The reader is an ex-garrison member of the Quinta district, which is abandoned and isolated shortly after the fall of Wall Maria. Eren has been in his titan form for years, since even before the breach of the outermost wall, but has an undeniable need to protect the reader after he saves their life and frees them from the walls that might have otherwise been their grave.

Life is fading from you. With every moment, every slowing beat of your heart, you can all but feel the very force of will leak from every inch of your body into the dark, freezing water that surrounds you. Even though your lungs burn and your body aches for but the briefest touch of solid ground, the most you can do is reach your hand up desperately towards the surface of the churning river’s surface while the rest of you continues to fade, falling deeper into the murky depths.

Only to be forgotten to history as one of the last deaths to mark the bloodstained streets of your home.

If you could laugh, you’d be laughing now—all the care and caution in the world to keep yourself from falling into a titan’s maw, and it’s the stupidest, silliest mistake that pushes you to your end.

From far above the broken surface of the water is the stars. Their faint light gazes down upon you, as if a witness to your final moments of misery within an otherwise silent night, forgotten to all and to be remembered by absolutely nobody.

You had wanted to see it through to the end. You had hoped, dreamed, yearned to see the day that your home would be saved, reclaimed with Wall Maria—but all you’ve manage to do is stave off death for seven long, lonely months.

_And for what?_

_For what…?_

_For…_

* * *

The news arrives from a single soldier on horseback. He comes through the open gate, nearly running over several merchants, screaming with such shrill fear that it’s almost hard to make out the detail of his words.

“Wall Maria!” he screams, shouting to all who can hear him as he rides through the district; he can’t be barely out of his cadet training like you, shaking so hard that he nearly sends his horse careening into a cart. “Wall Maria has fallen! Everyone is to evacuate towards Wall Rose immediately—take only what you need to survive and nothing else.”

You’re cleaning and repair duty for your squadron, selected if only by the fact that you are the newest recruit to the garrison and nothing else. There is no rhyme or reason to where you find yourself in the moment that chaos breaks out, no grand fate of the universe that placed you there any differently than it had placed anyone else in the district—

-but it was from that place that you were cursed never to leave the walls of Quinta again. Because, when the news finally reached you through the rushed, chaotic screams and shouts of the fleeing people, it’s already too late.

Every horse from every board house is gone, taken by all the frantic families and soldiers that were simply fast and smart enough to grab them. Once those were gone, some poor souls left the district on foot, rushing without thinking through the situation clearly. You merely watch from the vantage point atop the barrack building, cold realization only now to the gravity of the situation at hand.

Without horses, there’s no hope of making it to the next wall. It would take days at the fastest and with minimal rest, and there’s no guarantee of what would await any desperate refugee out in the open environment. How many titans have already spilled into the land between Wall Maria and Wall Rose? Even if most of them simply continued to wander north towards Trost, there would always be an uncountable variable that would make their way west; and if even one happened to come upon a desperate caravan of people hoping to take refuge in the next wall…

The screams from the streets below you served enough to drown out the thoughts that might follow in the situation. You don’t even want to think about it, the situation is already enough of a nightmare as it is—you still think it’s a nightmare for a while longer, pinching yourself to bruises if only to wake yourself up.

_Please, no. No. Anything but this._

As far as you know, it’s the end of the world.

Those who couldn’t find horses and weren’t stupid enough to leave without one finally decide to shut the gate. It’s the only option available, to make sure that no titan can simply wander in from the wildlands and come crawling into the defenseless district all but abandoned by the soldiers who had been stationed here.

Abandoned. You spend some time trying to take in who is left of your squad, but eventually the question broadens into how many garrison members at _all_ are left within the walls of Quinta.

None. Absolutely nobody.

You’re alone.

All alone.

You’d only been out of the cadet corps for a few weeks, and suddenly you find yourself the sole soldier between these helpless people and the unwavering hordes of titans that might very well come wandering towards you.

The very thought terrifies you.

* * *

One day turns to two, then three, then a week, and then a month. Most of Quinta remains in the confines of the city, but you can’t be sure of the specifics. It turned out that there were other garrison members left in the district after everything, and you hoped that they might take charge to put some hope back into the people’s hearts as much as your own. Promise some sort of rescue, even if such a thing would have been a cold lie forced between teeth.

You wanted _anything_.

But in the end, whatever little sense of hope you held beside your heart was shattered by the chaos that greeted you each and every day. Quinta devolved into anarchy at first, and then they attempted to claim secession from the other walls for a kingdom of their own—all the while, people died each and every day from a variety of ailments. Dehydration, starvation, or simply losing the will to keep looking towards an endless string of hopeless days.

You’re not sure how you weren’t one of them. The first ones to go. But somehow, you manage to keep your mind busy with the idea of being rescued—so you keep all the ODM gear cleaned and maintained as best you can in the barracks. You keep a careful stock of what little rations you have, and take to collecting rainwater in all the buckets you can find.

 _I will survive,_ you tell yourself. _I will see the day we’re rescued._

After four months, Quinta moves back into anarchy. Eight months sees the population down to a fourth of what it was originally. Ten months, and nearly all the rations available are gone. You still have some stashed away deep within the barracks, but most everyone has long forgotten about you—one scared little greenhorn who was in the wrong place at the wrong time to be able to escape with a horse from this isolated hell.

And after a year?

The titans finally get in.

You’re not sure of how it happened, exactly. Bits and pieces of that day are faded, as if they’d been forced from your mind with nothing less than disgust and fear, only to be recalled in the darkest evenings as nightmares to haunt you again and again when you think yourself safe at last.

Maybe they finally learned how to climb the damn walls. Maybe someone was stupid enough to open the gate, thinking they were somehow special enough to make it all the way to Wall Rose. Maybe…maybe….fuck, maybe the damn beasts grew wings and flew over the fucking wall.

They got in. That’s all that mattered to you. They got in, and you heard it happen. Heard every scream, every agonizing noise as another life was stuffed between the jaws of a mindless titan, and all you could do was huddle in fear within the confines of the barracks desperately hoping that they’d never even realize you were there.

You were never trained for this.

Things eventually quieted down. Several of the damn monsters remained in the abandoned district even when you wondered if you were the last living person within it’s cursed walls, making it nearly impossible to go out for more than a brief few minutes every night. But you did regardless, to see if there were storm clouds coming your way to bring the only thing keeping you alive from one day to the next: water. 

You survive by a combination of luck and caution for more months than you can count. Learning how the beasts move, how they hunt, how they wander within the desolate roads within the corpse of your home, each day growing ever more desperate as supplies start to wane, but you refuse to think about the day that you run out of them completely.

After almost two years, you'd think that survival would be easy. To find food and keep out of sight, with enough experience in dealing with titans than you'd ever wanted to know in your entire life.

But even then, even after so long, you're left desperate in searching for the telltale signs of dark clouds coming close on the horizon. You’d rationed out the water from the last rainstorm as best you could, but you’ve been bone-dry for the last two days and you can _feel_ it. Feel exhaustion start to creep in, settle into your bones. Next would be lethargy, then apathy, and then….

You try to tell yourself that the idea is smart, driven solely by the sense of logic than desperation. Because if it’s logical, then you don’t have to think about the risks, don’t have to think about what would happen if it goes wrong. There’s a section of the district that floods whenever it rains; it had acted as a large-scale reservoir of water for Quinta’s forgotten people; when there had been other people alive, at least.

You’d reach the water in the dead of night on a rainstorm. You’d make several trips, collect as much water as you could—that way, you’d have more than enough in reserve to make sure that your livelihood wouldn’t rest on the fickle mercy of mother nature. To live. To _survive_.

When the droplets start to fall one one particularly dark night, the plan seems to work perfectly. One trip has two full buckets of water, stored safely within the barracks old storeroom, and not a single titan in the path you needed to take to get to the reservoir. It seems _perfect_ , but you were so desperate, so scared, so blinded by having a simple goal to entertain your mind away from the situation that you didn’t realize how slick that the rain had made the dirt beneath your feet, turning it into mud that slipped like ice beneath your boots and-

Suddenly-

You’re beneath the surface of the water, sinking from the weight of your own ODM gear, and you can’t breathe.

* * *

_..._

_So this is how it ends?_

You want to laugh, want to laugh so hard that you begin to sob. Fate is fickle and cruel, just as unyielding as the very force of mother nature that led you to the reservoir. The very same lifegiving water is what will be your death.

Darkness starts to overtake your vision and mind, you’re sure that’s the last thing you will ever think.

Except its not. Though your senses are dulled and dark, you feel a sudden shift of the water around your body, and then a grip wrapping around your torso, pushing your arms to your chest and immobilizing you completely. From there, your dulled awareness takes a few numb moments before realizing the pressure wrapped around you is a hand. A large hand.

A titan’s hand.

Fear surges through you. Like lightning so hot that it hurts nearly as much as the realization of what’s happening to you, though you can do absolutely nothing about it. Even if you had the strength to struggle or scream, you simply can’t fight against the fact that you’re starved for oxygen and are fading fast. Your best hope for a quick death is for this curious beast to squeeze the life out of your body before pulling you up and out of the water—maybe that would be less painful than the slow suffocation that otherwise awaits you.

But it doesn’t.

You’re suddenly pulled from the water, up and above the surface—and you breathe. You _breathe,_ gasping desperately for air to fill your aching, dying lungs. The darkness and the death that it represented fades from the center of your vision, and with it returns your senses, but it lingers at the edge of your awareness.

 _You’re not safe from death yet_ , as if it’s to say.

And it’s true. For the moment you gain enough awareness to follow the situation and understand what comes next, you open your eyes and start to hurriedly look around in a desperate flurry of motions. But do you want to watch? Do you want to see the beast’s face come ever closer to you before the end?

You’re not sure, but search all the same—meanwhile, you realize that the titan isn’t squeezing you. It’s barely even _holding_ you, just enough so that you don’t slip from the it’s hand in the utter downpour of rain still falling heavy atop your head.

By the time you find the beast’s face, death still hasn’t come for you with sharp teeth and an unyielding jaw. No, you meet with the titan’s eyes only to find it _watching_ you, unmoving and still, holding you not as if to bring you closer, but more as if it’s…..just…. holding you.

Like a baby bird within it’s massive palms.

The creature shifts it’s hands around you, letting you roll over yourself until you’re laying back against it’s open palm and staring up into emerald eyes so bright in color that they almost seem to glow in the darkness of the moonless sky.

The near-drowning experience is but one of several factors that keep you frozen. Though your lungs feel ablaze and your very bones ache with the need for oxygen, every inch of you is shaking with horror.

This titan is _massive_. Shaggy, shoulder, length brown hair, jaw lipless to reveal several rows of glimmering teeth, and it’s _eyes_. They watch you, but not in the way that you’re used to seeing from titans—the look in them isn’t hallow and empty, but filled with a sense of life, of meaning, of thought.

And it still hasn’t eaten you.

Why?

The question spurs you to life, chest spasming until water starts to come up your throat and out your mouth in loud coughs and sputters. You feel it ache every inch up your throat. Deep in your chest. But even then, you can’t stop the way you turn your eyes to the face of the beast whom holds you like a delicate creature than as a meal, and ask,

“Why?”

You’re shaking even as you move, unable to get to your feet but nonetheless trying.

“Why aren’t you eating me? Why did you-” you peer down towards the dark expanse of water that had filled up into a small but intimidating pond—obviously deep enough to drown a person. “-why did you save me? What….are you….?”

You expected the moment to suddenly come back to itself at any point while you speak—for the titan to remember itself, it’s place in the world as little more than a monster hell-bent on devouring each and every human it finds.

But it doesn’t. It, and there is no other way you can describe the moment, but it seems to _listen_.

Seems to _understand_ you.

And maybe you’re crazy. Maybe you’ve gone absolutely insane and are doing nothing more than laying on the floor of the barracks hallucinating this entire thing. But, despite it all, you are standing in the palm of a titan who has saved your life, one who looks at you with such bright green eyes that seem… almost human. You’re exhausted, you’re hungry, you’re so tired of being within these suffocating walls and waiting for the day that you’d finally succumb to the never-ending, hopeless line of days being abandoned by others and waiting for a rescue that will _never_ come.

So you stare at this titan for a long while, until you see it tilt its head to the side, as if checking to make sure you were still alive. And the rain howls, howls so hard around you that it’s as if mother nature herself is screaming at the act that had stolen you from her declaration for you to die right then and there in the cold depths of the water.

“Can you-...c-can you take me beyond the walls?”

You’re not quite sure what moved you to ask such a question. But even as you look for a reason, for logic, the words continue to pour out of your lips like a waterfall of emotion that hurts as much as the water still sitting in your lungs.

“Please—please take me out of here, I can’t—” tears, whether fearful or desperate or outright crazy, flow free from your eyes and mix with the rain rolling down your cheeks. “Please—… I want to be free from this hell. I… can’t stay here another day. If you can understand me, a-and you were willing to save me, th-then take me out of here with you.”

When it doesn’t respond after a moment, anger suddenly wells within you instead, and you kick a foot against the curve of it’s thumb.

“And if you can’t do that,” you say, not sure how much of it is fear or an absolute bluff of a soldier gone insane. “Then just drop me back in the water so it can finish what it started.”

Still, the titan watches you. _Watches_ , not stares. The creature’s eyes follow your movements, and for a moment you catch a glint of light unlike anything you’d seen in all the titans that had swarmed your home and driven you to near-maddness (if you weren’t utterly mad right now).

It nods.

Did…it really do that?

“D-do that again,” you say and, after a moment (after a moment to _think_ ), the titan nods again.

_Is that agreement to your request?_

You take a step forward, but slip against the slick surface of the titan’s flat palm. For a moment you think you’re going to meet a repeat of your exact same mistake just a short eternity before, but suddenly there’s something in front of you to flail your arms out and catch, something pushing you back up to stand proper: the titan’s other hand, held out in a way where you’re able to hold onto it’s index finger, in a way that is unlike any sort of motion or sense of gentleness—of restraint—than you’d ever even imagined a titan was or is ever capable of.

And then it moves its hand—and you—closer. But not to the creature’s mouth, but its shoulder. From there, it gently pushes a finger against the back of your body until you get the message it’s trying to convey: to step onto its shoulder, holding securely onto a thick lock of the wet, dark hair framing its face.

Before you have the sense to speak, or even think, the titan is moving; it steps out of the reservoir with one motion, as if the body of water is little more than a puddle, and then starts to move in a sharp, jogging speed towards one of the walls.

The walls.

 _Freedom_.

It takes the beast a while to climb them, but awe and shock keep you from doing anything that might have you toppling off its shoulders. But when it finally moves to the very top of the walls, you finally realize that the rain has begun to let up, slowly brightening until, at last, you can see the vast lands of inner Wall Maria so clearly beneath the faint light of stars. You are sure in that very same moment that you are not dreaming, because there is absolutely nothing that even your fevered mind could conjure up that is half as beautiful, half as wonderful as but the mere glance at the world outside Quinta.

There is so much you want to know, so many questions you want to ask, but you allow yourself just that one moment of relief and happiness after such a long stretch of days filled with misery and fake hope that you would otherwise survive long enough to be rescued.

You never thought that the rescue would be at the hands of a titan. A titan whom it was on this day you met and would befriend, whom would protect you through even more dire situations than you can ever imagine.

His name, you will soon learn, is Eren.

**Author's Note:**

> If you want to read more of my stuff, check out my Attack on Titan writing blog on Tumblr @ [attackontitanwritings](https://attackontitanwritings.tumblr.com/).


End file.
